Memory is a machine, he says, and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If youre capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.
Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa. Hes here for a national science conference to give a speech about his research, which involves the intersection of emotion, stress and memory. What hes found is that under some circumstances, the most sophisticated part of our thought-processing center can be held hostage to a competing memory system, a primitive portion of the brain that is -- by a design as old as the dinosaurs -- inattentive, pigheaded, nonanalytical, stupid...
When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; thats why youll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.
Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the 1812 Overture. The cannons take over and overwhelm.
By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents brains, Diamond has found that stress -- either sudden or chronic -- can weaken the brains higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. Hes seen the same sort of thing play out in cases hes followed involving infant deaths in cars.
The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant, he said. The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what its supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back -- it can entirely disappear.
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